Google’s New SDK for Making Cross-Platform Apps Launches in Beta

Google today released its mobile UI framework for building cross-platform applications as a beta. The open-source project, Flutter, lets developers build native cross-platform apps for Android and iOS in Dart.

Flutter is a lot like Facebook’s cross-platform React Native project: it’s designed to make it easy for developers to build cross-platform apps with a shared code base. Like React Native, Flutter lets developers build applications with platform-specific features and access core hardware features on Android and iOS. Flutter also includes one of React Native’s most popular features: Hot Reload, making it dead easy for developers to work on their app without needing to re-compile it every time they make a tiny tweak. Developers can build Flutter applications with Dart 1, but it also works with the pre-release of Dart 2.

Flutter is an open-source technology, so it already has a package library. Google says there are already more than 1000 third-party modules for Flutter that developers can use right away with their apps, including things like Firebase, and GraphQL. React Native obviously had a huge head-start, and its collection of third-party packages is significantly bigger. In addition to the third-party packages, Flutter comes pre-packed with some built-in widgets/components that will further speed up the development of apps which is pretty neat.

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